Quotes About Writing

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget.

I wrote about myself so I wouldn't become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it. More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.

Slowly, slowly, I accumulate sentences. I have no idea what I'm doing until suddenly it reveals itself, almost done.

The trouble was that I failed to record so much , I wrote, but how could I have believed that if I tried hard enough, I could remember everything?

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness. Of course .

I annotated my friend's book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better . She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

Another friend said, I want to write sentences that seem as if no one wrote them. The goal being the creation of a pure delivery system, without the distraction of a style. The goal being a form no one notices, the creation of what seems like pure feeling, not of what seems like a vehicle for a feeling. Language as pure experience, pure memory. I too wanted to achieve that impossible effect.

My least favorite received idea about writing is that one must find one's voice, as if it's there inside you, ready to be turned on like a player piano. Like character, its very existence depends on interaction with the world.

I write in defense of the beliefs I fear are least defensible.

It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live.

As she became more honest with herself, her writing matured, so that one could catch glimpses of what would emerge from its chrysalis as a poet's genius.

I studied law at Columbia, but I was more interested in why people committed crimes than I was in defending them. I finished my first novel, handed it to my roommate to read and he was up all night. I decided then that was what I wanted to do." "Keep people awake all night?" "Yes.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.

I thought that I could make my life into a book that had no life or love in it. . . . Now I can see that my heart has crept across these pages, after all.

I mean this book to be different to that one. I mean this writting not to turn me back upon my own thoughts, but to serve, like the chloral, to keep the thoughts from coming at all.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.

My joking answer to this question is that I leave a bowl of milk out on the back porch every night for the Idea Fairy. In the morning, the milk is gone and there's a brand-new shiny idea by the bowl.

I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.

There have come to be a number of ways to write sushi, but all are derived from the old word suppashi, meaning "sour". In its original form, sushi was fish preserved with salted rice, a process that seems to have originated in southeast Asia.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?

Every book, every story, has a sort of invisible signature at the front. And when you've written the first few lines of a story, those govern all the rest that follows.